Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 NAS Device

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Design & Build Quality

The 440 comes in a black aluminum and plastic enclosure that measures 6.30x8.15x10.59-inches (HWD). The front of the device includes an LED display with two navigation buttons that let you scroll through 10 different bits of information about the device, such as IP address, disk health, fan speed, and temperature. Located on the bottom of the front of the device are the power button and three blue LEDs, which display system status, and the status of each of the two LAN port connections. This lower panel also houses a single USB 2.0 port.

A server door on the front of the device swings out to reveal the four drive bays. Below each bay is a green LED activity status light--these lights are only visible when the server door is open. Swapping drives is a completely tool-less affair: The drives mount into the drive cartridges using pins, and then the cartridges simply slides into the drive bays.

The most prominent feature on the back of the unit is the exhaust port for the internal fan. A Kensington Slot is located on the upper-left of the back panel. On the bottom of the back of the unit are two Gigabit Ethernet ports, three USB 2.0 ports, the power jack, and a reset button.

You can connect external hard drives or flash drives to all four USB ports. In fact, a Seagate tech informed us that he was able to successfully attach seven USB drives to the 440 using a USB hub. You can only attach a single printer to the 440, however, despite the plethora of USB ports. Seagate has tested the 440 internally with close to 60 different printers, but the company doesn't currently post this list on its site (note to Seagate: perhaps this is something you should include in your online support documents). The 440's print server uses CUPS (Common UNIX Printing Services), so Macs and Linux systems should have little trouble printing to the 440's printer server. Windows XP also has a pretty good track record printing to CUPS-based print servers. Windows Vista systems, on the other hand, have proved more problematic getting them to print to CUPS-based servers--it can be done, but it might require a fair bit of tweaking and experimenting to get it to work.